


the truth the dead know

by iwillbeyourgoal



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, angsty fluff, i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 06:51:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3165440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iwillbeyourgoal/pseuds/iwillbeyourgoal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"it is december. i am tired of being brave."<br/>set in a strange future where nothing matters but what bellamy and clarke are up to, as per.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the truth the dead know

**Author's Note:**

> from the prompt "new york alley snow" from sera pearswhy on tumblr.  
> this is very weird!! set some indeterminate time in the future. please enjoy with caution as i wrote most of this on almost no sleep.

They’d been walking for so long. It had been, what—two? Three months since they had even been close to the site where their group landed so long ago? Clarke felt like she had lived enough lives to populate Earth, each with their own arc—rise, climax, fall.

She was tired.

Bellamy was, too, by the looks of him. The grey sky complimented the sallow tone of his skin, the pinkish hue under his eyes. They slept, sure, but never for more than four hours each. It takes a toll on you eventually, but Clarke wasn’t sure if it was heavier than the lack of knowing if their friends were dead or not.

They still didn’t know where the attack came from, or who even authorized it. The flaming explosives were far too advanced for Grounders, and the thought that it might have been some of their people from the Ark was too much for either of them to bear. Clarke had been teaching Bellamy how to dress a wound (he’d been getting more and more interested in what she and her mother did, and Clarke was more than happy to get a surgeon’s assistant when their people needed it.) Suddenly a horrid bloom of flames enveloped a bush not ten feet from where they were, and chaos ensued, as it’s wont to do. Octavia, Jasper and Raven were somewhere on the other side of camp, and the rest of their people were either hunting or working.

Clarke turned to grab them, but a bomb (bomb? She didn’t even know) exploded in front of her, and Bellamy took her wrist and ran as far away as she’d let him. They ducked beneath a growth in the ground big enough to house at least a few people and waited until the noise and visible flames subsided. When they went back, most of camp was scorched and none of their friends were anywhere to be seen.

And they had kept running, figuring it wasn’t safe to stay where they’d been at the moment, and here they were. Wherever it was. There was overgrowth and it was a forest, but the trees and vines were denser here, even though it was definitely much colder—Clarke was fairly certain she’d seen a few snowflakes fall through the leaves of the trees. There was a small mountain or hill in the near horizon; she figured they could rest on that for a bit before continuing on.

Clarke was pretty sure they’d been gone for at least a month, but Lord knows time meant nothing to anyone on Earth. In any case, it _was_ colder, which she was fairly certain meant the Earth was keeping track of the days, even if she wasn’t.

Looking at Bellamy beside her, she felt the urge to talk. They never really indulged that side of them anymore, their vocal cords gone almost raw with disuse. But right now, yeah, she wanted to talk. A “Princess,” a snarky look, anything would be better than this blue-grey silence they had going on at present.

“Hey,” she settled on. She didn’t know why she needed to decide on safe conversation, but since they’d left she wasn’t sure what was okay and what wasn’t.

He turned to look at her, then back ahead. “Hi.”

“How’s it going?” Long shot, she knew.

He snorted, a sound that was fairly foreign to her ears as of late. She relished it, hoped she wouldn’t forget it.

“I’ve been better,” he said, nodding.

“I understand.” She did.

Sometimes when she was looking at Bellamy and he didn’t know it, she tried to reconcile this Bellamy of hers with the one she met so long ago, fresh off the Ark. She wasn’t ever able to—they had all done things to survive on Earth, she understood that the role of Big Bad “Whatever The Hell You Want” Alpha Dog was safe, but that wasn’t him. It had never been him.

Not to say that he wasn’t a natural leader, of course he was. It’s the style of leadership he subscribed to that differentiated the two hims. Just in the seemingly short time Clarke had known him, he’d grown so much more compassionate and _strong_. It was the kind of transition that the main characters go through in the fairy tale books Clarke read when she was a child, only Bellamy Blake was no prince. He was more like the roguish thief that the King and Queen disapproved of. Or something.

She squinted her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose to rid herself of thoughts of princesses and thieves. There wasn’t any room for that on Earth.

As they continued forward, she noted that it was definitely snowing, the falling sheets getting heavier (but not quicker, she noticed.) She squinted at the mountain, which seemed to be getting bigger and bigger. It was curved at the top, and if she were to bet money on it, she’d say it actually didn’t look like a mountain at all.

“Hey,” she said, nudging Bellamy and pointing in the distance. “What does that look like to you?”

He narrowed his eyes and tilted his head before replying, “Well, I _thought_ it was some kind of hill, but now I’m not sure.”

“Right? It seems… off.”

Bellamy looked down at her with what could have been construed as part of a smile. She tried not to notice the snowflakes landing in his hair and melting just as quickly as they came. “Let’s check it out.”

She nodded, starting again with a sense of purpose, however miniscule and seemingly useless. They fell into that familiar silence, but now that Clark felt what it was like to talk again, to have the possibility of smiling or making someone else smile, she was loathe to give it up.

“Where do you think the others are?” This was new ground. They had silently settled on never mentioning the friends they’d left behind. “Monty and Raven and all of them?”

Bellamy looked at her only briefly as they walked, no emotion registering as he answered. “I don’t know. Hopefully safe somewhere. Maybe with your mom and Kane.”

“Somehow that doesn’t really, you know. Calm me down.”

“Wasn’t supposed to.”

It wasn’t worth pressing further, Clarke decided. Not knowing where Octavia was or if she was alright took more of a toll on Bellamy than he’d willingly let on, and Clarke could sort of see why he didn’t want to talk about the possibility of everyone they knew being dead.

The “mountain” was almost in front of them now, and it was growing clearer that this wasn’t something that grew from soil.

“It’s from America,” Clarke said softly as they approached.

She had never held any misplaced nostalgia for the times before the Ark—why would she? Not even her grandparents were alive when the Earth dissolved into war. She never really understood why people wanted to cling to the old days, but she supposed it played into the whole “wanting what you can’t have” ideology a lot of people were wont to have.

“Are you sure?” Bellamy asked, stepping ahead of her to get a better look.

“What else could it be? I mean, look at it, it’s all weird-shaped and grown over with vines.”

“It could be a trap, Clarke,” he said. “It could be a trap, or some old Grounder weapon, or something left over from science experiments on Mount Weather, or—”

“God, Bellamy, I get it,” Clarke said, rolling her eyes. “Since when are you Mr. Anxiety Pants?”

“I’m just being careful, a part of the brain which you were seriously deprived from at birth.”

“Bite me.”

He stopped a few yards away from the growth and stared at it for a few moments before a look of dawning realization appeared on his face.

“I know what this is,” he said in an awed voice. “I know…”

Clarke looked at him, then the mountain, then him again. She wasn’t sure which pieces of the puzzle she was missing. “Well, I mean… what is it?”

“It’s part of a statue from America, it was called, like, the statue of liberty or freedom or something. It was a woman in a robe and a crown holding up a torch, and I’m positive this is the torch.”

He pointed and Clarke’s gaze followed—the torch was definitely connected to something, a long cylindrical-looking object that seemed to go on forever into the brush.

“So I was right.” Clarke was almost never one to brag, but she felt a little proud that she picked up on the “mountain’s” origins before he did.

“Yeah, guess you were,” Bellamy said, stepping closer to the torch. Clarke followed him, keeping only a bit of distance between the two of them.

“How do you know about this, anyway?” she asked.

“I had an old kind of history book that my mom gave me to read to Octavia at night, and this was in it,” he said, reaching a hand out to touch it. “The Americans put this thing up in one of their harbors to welcome new people to their country, people who weren’t from there but wanted to make a new life.”

Clarke wasn’t sure if he was really hearing what he was saying, but she also wasn’t sure if it would be worth pointing it out. So instead she reached out and took his hand, their palms wet with melted snow.

He turned to her, glancing down at their hands before back at her with a questioning look.

“Let’s go back home, Bellamy,” was all she said. Standing there for a second, he nodded finally and turned away from the statue’s torch, and they started their way back.


End file.
